Life's Rich Pageant

Attending the Tour de France can seem like the ultimate tease: You travel far and endure untold logistical headaches, then the riders blow by in seconds. How could it be worth the effort? When Hampton Sides plunges in for the first time, he finds that you don’t just go to watch the race—you go to partake.

IT WAS BASTILLE Day—my first day at the Tour de France—and already the race was getting away from me. I sped down a serpentine road in the foothills of the Pyrenees, painfully aware that this was scenery no one should ever have to hurry through: mustard fields, 500-year-old ruins, happy dairy cows proffering udders to anyone who’d drink. I was traveling with my wife, Anne, an NPR reporter. Our credentials gave us access to lots of places, but didn’t allow us to follow the racers on the roads. So, after the morning’s fictif start—the ­ceremonial one put on for tourists—we had immediately blasted off from Cugnaux on alternate routes in hopes of leapfrogging the racers and intersecting with them ­midday in a village several valleys away.

Not only were we late—we were lost. We had a Garmin GPS and a topo map of the Pyrenees spread across the dash of our rental Peugeot, but they were no help. The tiny roads wriggled in all directions like deep-tissue capillaries, passing through obscure hyphenated villes like Bagnères-de-Bigorre and Argelès-Gazost. They were doubtless lovely places to stop for lunch, but I mashed the pedal, gnawing on a blood sausage and a hunk of cave-aged Basque cheese. As we hunted for possible shortcuts on the Garmin, bits of crust, rind, and garlicky sausage skin accumulated in the folds of the car.

A U-turn, a goat traffic jam, a police barricade, and several backtracks later, I turned at last onto a promising road. We hurtled past olive groves, fig orchards, and nodding sunflower fields, through long tunnels of waxy elm trees, constantly fretting at the time. Finally the road crested a hill, and there it was, our objective for the past two hours: Sarrancolin, a commune of about 600 souls with a steeple rising over slate parapets and shutters thrown open to the light. The square buzzed with the excitement of imminent invasion. Helicopters hovered and a vanguard of police motorcycles rumbled along the cobblestones.

The locals were excited to have the Tour pass through—and on a national holiday at that. I smiled at two elderly sisters in cheery dresses and party hats who sat in front of their house, a pitcher of sangria and a vase of freshly plucked flowers gracing a table covered in lace linen. Banners draped everywhere—Viva le Voeckler!—reminded anyone who didn’t already know that on Stage 12 a Frenchman was wearing the yellow jersey. Race officials hadn’t set up barricades as they do in larger towns. A crowd gathered and people craned their necks to see beyond a cluster of shops that created a sharp blind curve.

Beer and bikes are inextricably linked in encampments lining the course. (Mike Powell)

Impatient for a better view, I started to cross the street. Suddenly the gendarmes blew their whistles and shrieked their displeasure. Just then, in a blur of spandex and a squabble of radios, the front of the peloton zoomed around the corner at 40 mph: Alberto Contador, the Schleck brothers, Cadel Evans, all the giants and the lesser-knowns, too, more than 150 cyclists, with a fumy, jittery convoy of support vehicles close on their wheels. I stood there, blinking, a lump in the pit in my stomach—but immensely relieved not to have caused an international incident: Idiot American Ruins Tour de France, Then Dies.

The crowd’s proximity to the cyclists, and all the trust it implied, astounded me. There we were, within a few thin inches of some of the most gifted athletes on the planet competing in their pinnacle event—close enough to smell their sweat, to hear the tick of their gears, to touch their gibbonlike arms. It was ­intoxicating. It was exhilarating. And then...it was over. As suddenly as the peloton appeared, it vanished in the mountain haze. The encounter lasted slightly longer than a minute.

We scurried back to our sausage-perfumed Peugeot to speed many convoluted kilometers onward, solving new riddles of the French countryside in hopes of glimpsing the racers again. If we were lucky, we might catch them at the finish—three rivers, a mountain range, and two gorgeous valleys away.

I HAVE ATTENDED and written about many iconic sporting events—the Indianapolis 500, the World Cup, the Iditarod—but I’d never covered a bike race before, let alone Le Tour. In truth, I’d come to the Pyrenees less to cover the race than to try to comprehend it. I was in Paris last summer doing book research when I realized I had some extra time to follow along. I would be a cultural tourist with a single goal: to try to make sense of the sheer carnival lunacy of the massive moveable feast I’d seen on TV. It seemed like a fun if possibly quixotic idea. So I met up with Anne and we hopped the bullet train for Montpellier and the Pyrenees beyond.

By certain definitions, the Tour is the world’s largest spectator sport. An estimated 12 million people lined the routes last summer to take in the spectacle (tens of millions more watched it on television and online). During the most popular stages, when riders tackle the storied climbs in the Alps or Pyrenees, more than a half-million people pack in along the roads on any given day—twin ribbons of humanity stretching for more than a hundred miles.

I couldn’t get my head around what draws so many people to see this in person. Intellectually, I grasp the race’s appeal. But as my first day demonstrated, the Tour de France is hard to get to and complicated to understand, and once you catch the tiniest glimpse of it, it’s gone. I’d never been so close to the action yet so far removed from the intricacies of what was going on. Bicycle racing is a mostly internalized story of watts and wills, of pumping hearts, of coursing acids and catalyzing chemicals, a sport whose most meaningful plots might unfold inside radio earpieces, behind tinted sunglasses, in the commands of unseen team directors who employ strategies that could take a fortnight to be revealed. There are nuances of physics, aerodynamics, diet, hydration, individual psychology, team psychology, and possible pharmaceutical enhancement that can only be surmised. From a spectator’s point of view, it has to be the most logistically insane event ever dreamed up. You’ll get a far better idea of what’s happening by staying home and watching the thing on NBC Sports Network.

Clearly the masses show up for other reasons. Is it simple inspiration? The natural human attraction to spectacle? Or is it some elaborate exercise in schadenfreude? Something in the relationship between the emotional throngs and the suffering athletes must be unique: the riders who offer up their bodies to the sport, the crowds who must be present to make the sacrifice complete. Whatever it is, something else was going on—and that something is what I’d come to the Pyrenees to understand.

THE BEST WAY to soak up the pageantry of the Tour de France, we soon learned, is not to chase it down, but to pick a place and wait for it. For Stage 14, on the storied climb toward the Plateau de Beille, Anne and I nosed the Peugeot into a slot on soggy grass, tight between some drunk Germans and some drunker Brits. All around us in the alpine meadow was a great Tabernacle City of tents and auto-campers. In this area alone, easily 20,000 people were dug in. Many had been here for days—grilling brats, dancing in makeshift discotheques, watching the Tour on TV sets in “sports bars” that sold draft Stella Artois. They’d come from all over the world to feed off each other’s weird energy as they waited for the cyclists to blast through.

Strutting about were various caped crusaders and off-color mascots. There was the infamous Penis Man—a guy who for inexplicable reasons ­follows the race dressed as the proverbial meat-and-two-veg. (“If you see my boss,” he told me, “shhhhhhh!”)­ There was the even more infamous Devil Man, Didi Senft, who eerily manages to be everywhere on the Tour. There was a Borat in his mankini and rabbles of shirtless Vikings wearing horns and wielding hammers, ­Norwegian colors slathered over their fair-skinned bodies. There were Spaniards, many in matador getups, spraying C-O-N-T-A-D-O-R stencils on the pavement. There was someone in a Dominique Strauss-Kahn costume, fondling a buxom hotel maid (really a hairy man in drag and fishnet stockings). Many costumes made no sense at all—or merely followed the dim logic of booze. But who cared? It was the Plateau de Beille, one of the Tour’s biggest days, a grand party lofted high on a mountain.

In places, the human tunnel surrounding riders is only a few feet wide. (Mike Powell)

Interspersed through this silliness were families on holiday—kids, grandpas,­ dogs, batty old aunts, infants, newlyweds. Each encampment flew its country’s colors. This was how they spent their hard-earned vacation euros—living cheek-by-jowl with other fanatics in a mountainside global village. The population density was extreme, but a prevailing discretion, a European ethos for spatial economics, somehow made it feel civilized. This polyglot township fit snugly together, radiating health and pan-national concord. For all the revelry, I saw no fights, no vomit, and little in the way of gross overindulgence.

We fell in with a group of three Danes who’d layered their Tour onto a three-week wine safari, hitting dozens of obscure high-end vintners. They weren’t cycling fans exactly, but the Tour gave shape and direction to their extended oenothon. Little by little, their vintage Citroen 2CV had filled with cases of wine, to the point where they scarcely had room to sit. “We come to follow Tour, sleep on ground, and drink expensive vine,” said Jorgen, who was from just outside Copenhagen. “But we must drink faster—no space left for da luggage!”

We moved higher up the mountain to a perch closer to the finish. On one switchback, while we were stuck in traffic, a family of Basques came up to our car. “Where are you from?” they asked.

“New Mexico, in the United States,” my wife said.

The whole family was smiling, beaming, giggling. “Welcome,” the mother said, and she pointed down into the hazy folds of the valley where they lived. “From our trees,” ­the father said, and their children handed us four of the most beautiful, succulent peaches I’d ever seen. The Basques seemed so happy that people like us had come halfway around the world to spend time in their mountains. The peaches were amazing, but not as amazing as the look of irrepressible pride on our new friends’ faces.

ON ANOTHER DAY, up on the famed Col du Tourmalet, the mountainside was speckled with untold thousands of serious cyclists—the Velo-Pilgrims, the odiferous spandex-wearing legions, the iron-butted, wire-sinewed faithful, their arms and legs barnacled with road rash, the cleats of their shoes tap-tap-tapping along the pavement. They’d come to Olympus to breathe the rarefied air of the gods: bike-shop owners, bike-tour operators, bike designers, bike mechanics, bike nerds, bike snobs, bike evangelists, ­spin-class instructors, leathery triathletes.

Every rider has an image in his or her mind’s eye of the sport’s ultimate aesthetic, its perfect expression, the Platonic Form of Cycling, flickering in slow-­motion glory—just as river runners might see it on the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Riding up a switchbacked mountain, climbing ever higher into the mists, then pulling triumphantly away from the pack, with officious gendarmes and roaring crowds lining the way, cathedral spires dotting the distant valleys below. Here the Bike Pilgrims were experiencing it in knots of two and five and 20: holy ground.

Spectators learn to not chase the race, but to let it come to them. (Mike Powell)

I met a group of 30 Aussies (Cadel Evans fans, all) who’d rented a château in the valley and had been ­doing long rides all week. “But not t’dayyee, mate,” David from Canberra told me. “T’dayyee weee heeey t’poddy.” They couldn’t believe, after so many years of dreaming, that they were at the Tour de France. One of his buddies chimed in: “Tasting it, smelling it, seeing your heroes—it’s surreal.”

I ran into a family of four from San Diego who had the bug something bad. The dad told me that by a happy accident they were staying in the same hotel in Toulouse as both the RadioShack and Europcar teams. “We got to see the mechanics cleaning the bikes!” he said. “We got to watch the riders eating! I’m like, Thomas Voeckler, Levi Leipheimer! They were having pasta for breakfast!”

Later we met a group of cyclists from St. Louis who had been doing rides while loosely following the Tour. They did this every year, each guy for his own reasons. Tom, a history professor, explained that his wife had developed early- onset Alzheimer’s and was in a nursing home, needing constant care. “I really need this,” he said. “This is one thing in my life that’s just for me. It recharges my batteries. Coming here”—his voice quavered—“it’s really important.”

Suddenly the gendarmes blew their whistles, and the crowds tightened and hushed. Ils arrivent! Ils arrivent! The front-runners powered up the switchbacks, and when I first saw them, all I could think was, Good God! After riding hard for two weeks they were on a miles-long climb up a mountain with an 8 percent grade, and now, though their faces were contorted in rictuses of agony, they were still flying sleekly toward the summit, like geese heading north.

As they whooshed through, I found myself standing on the road’s edge, cheering with unexpected abandon alongside everyone else. Cheering for what? I couldn’t quite say. For what human beings can do? For this evidence of victory over pain? For a nice man whose wife back home is dying? Maybe I was cheering for my own dreams: If these guys can do this, there are still some things I can do.

Whatever it was, the emotion of it took me by surprise. As a journalist and historian, trained to be disinterested, I’m not used to being swept up in such moments. I sensed the racers drew as much from the crowd’s encouraging presence as we did from their supernatural feats. The faith on display here—the faith that people will be respectful in the face of human striving, the faith that athletes can be presented to their fans with this sort of intimacy—touched me. Somewhere in back of all the screaming and crying and drinking, there was a sense of piety. I felt invigorated to be part of this “human tunnel”—though the eloquence of my cheering wasn’t up to the level of the inspiration. All I could think to yell was: “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!”

AT THE FINISH in Lourdes, the cyclists threaded past the barricades and through the restricted area where the journalists were gathered. When Contador rolled by, I pushed through to watch him up close. He gingerly dismounted and the Team Saxo Bank trainers rushed over, treating him as if he were a casualty in a field hospital.

They gently wiped him down, wrapped him in thin layers of clothing, and listened attentively to his concerns. He stood in an awkward splay-footed stance, as if reluctant to put weight on his aching legs. His body was sleek and sharp as an assassin’s, but he seemed a wisp of a human ­being, strangely frail and vulnerable, his sense of ease and familiarity of ­movement tied to his bike.

Without both stars and legions of extras, the theater would be less grand. (Mike Powell)

Contador swiveled his big avian eyes over the crowd, answered a question in Spanish, and smiled as he turned away. He’d had a bad day. He was beat up and demoralized—he’d had four crashes in the first nine days, and he’d never recovered. There was a sadness about him, and he seemed quite alone. He faced doping allegations (which would, seven months later, result in a suspension). It was increasingly evident this was not his year. Evans and the Schleck brothers were pulling slowly, permanently away.

I stood in the filtered afternoon light, watching the other riders roll in. They were gasping, doubled over, their souls racked with pain—their exhaustion extending, I’m pretty sure, down to the level of marrow and enzymes and cells. This is what people look like who’ve just burned 7,000 calories in five or six hours. Who were these creatures? I wondered. They had a different kind of lungs, a different kind of metabolism, a different kind of neurological circuitry. It was the flesh of a lifetime spent reaching for lightness and speed, for smoothness and efficiency—the flesh of the jockey but also the horse.

As the trainers and soigneurs came over to minister to their cramps and hematomas, I could see the riders were ready to submit, as though their very hides were used to pampering but also indignity, to being kneaded and prodded, pinched by calipers, pricked by lancets, their bones set and reset, their systems tested, studied, tortured, and doubted. They were world-class athletes, and they were also professional medical patients. Nearby, in front of a little bakery, a neon sign flashed, “Pain... pain... pain.”

Like most spiritual pilgrimages, the Tour de France resists easy understanding and is full of paradox: It’s a grand parade of suffering that grinds through a nation keenly devoted to pleasure, a spectacle whose moments of ecstasy come after long hours of exertion and anticipation. I now realized that the huge crowds show up for the Tour not so much to see it as to partake: Almost as much as the racers themselves, they’re active participants, extras in a drama that moves beyond sport into other, higher realms—into questions of motivation and powers of will, into age-old mysteries of the spirit and flesh.

As the stragglers sailed across the finish, the work crews power-drilled the last pieces of the portable stage into place while the podium girls, in their canary-yellow dresses, primped in the wings. Thor Hushovd, the powerful Norwegian sprinter, was the day’s winner, and he flashed a beatific smile, pumping his fists, a vision in white spandex.

It was wonderful to experience all this in the heart of Lourdes, a pilgrimage shrine known the world over for its apparitions, magical cures, and holy waters burbling from the famous Grotto. It’s a largely chintzy place now, sad to say, but millions of faithful still make the trek to Lourdes every year, seeking relief from their sufferings. They still feel the Spirit—and still believe in the power of miracles.

Hampton Sides is the author of the bestseller, Hellhound On His Trail, and is now working on a book about an early American expedition to the North Pole, due out in 2013.

Like rapturous churchgoers, the attendees soak up the spectacle. (Mike Powell)

See for Yourself: Three outfitters who can make the dream happen—with less hassle than if you go it alone.

TREK TOURS
Highlights include VIP viewing points at stage starts or finishes, guided visits to team areas and buses, and the chance to ride the last few kilometers of a stage escorted by an official car. Trips range from four days to one week. trektravel.com
DISCOVER FRANCE
You get to hang out in the sign-in area where the pro teams arrive for the race, and, this year for the first time, ride in an official Tour car behind the peloton. Trips veer away in spots to ramp up the riding and lodging. tour-de-france-tours.com

CUSTOM GETAWAYS
This outfitter stands out for the breadth of its offerings both on and off the bike, from single-day outings (to view a stage’s start, a midpoint, and finish) to rides on Ventoux and Alpe d’Huez to self-guided driving trips that track the race through the Pyrenees to Paris. customgetaways.com

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